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Our purpose in this article is to determine the degree to which the cultural requisites to democracy are present in the contemporary political culture of the USSR. We focus on support for core democratic rights, liberties, and institutions. Data for this project come from a survey of 504 citizens of the Moscow Oblast conducted between February 17, 1990, and March 4, 1990. In absolute terms, support for democratic values is fairly widespread in the Moscow Oblast. We found significant levels of endorsement of competitive elections and for many democratic rights and liberties such as liberty and the norms of democracy. Many of the scales measuring support for democratic rights were intercorrelated, leading us to hypothesize the existence of a general underlying dimension of democratic values. The best predictors of attitudes toward general democratic values were education, gender, and age. The better educated, males, and the young tended to be more supportive of democratic institutions and processes. We take these findings as evidence that further efforts to democratize the Soviet Union will not meet resistance from Soviet political culture.
Gibson et al. (Fri,) studied this question.